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AMD OverDrive On Linux

08-20-2008, 12:40 PM

Phoronix: AMD OverDrive On Linux

When it comes to ATI hardware, one of the features we have been after for the longest time on Linux has been any overclocking support. Windows users have ATI's OverDrive at their disposal along with an arsenal of third-party utilities such as ATI Tool. NVIDIA also has various utilities for overclocking their graphics cards on Windows, but they also provide support for overclocking on Linux. Today though with the release of the Catalyst 8.8 Linux driver there is finally ATI OverDrive 5 support on Linux.

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is it possible to underclock the GPU core and mem as well?, I for one am thinking about putting together a HTPC and would want it the graphic adapter to run as cooler than the original spec design to make the whole system generate as little heat as possible.

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is it possible to underclock the GPU core and mem as well?, I for one am thinking about putting together a HTPC and would want it the graphic adapter to run as cooler than the original spec design to make the whole system generate as little heat as possible.

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Unfortunately not all cards support Powerplay (e.g. my MSI X1950Pro does not).

What I did was flash an underclocked BIOS to my X1950 (300MHz core instead of 675MHz), which improved power consumption, noise and heat output significantly. On Windows, I'm using overdrive with auto 3d detection to reset the clocks when gaming. That's not possible on Linux yet (no overdrive support for X1950), but the reduced noise makes up for the performance loss

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We'll also be shipping a Phoronix Test Suite module that automatically runs various OpenGL programs and will automatically overclock the graphics core and memory frequencies by a few megahertz each time until it finds the point of losing stability.

So, this auto-overclocking suite... did that ever pan out? Which one is it?